Bijan Parsia wrote:
I identified 3 problems, and this is only one. However, DNS doesn't
even do that *if I reuse your URIs*, or if I reuse your URI space
(which you may want me to do). E.g., I say
http://ex.org/#Bijan a Philosopher.
and you say
http://ex.org/#Bijan a PerfumeMaker.
I believe these uses point to completely unrelated thing (in speakers
meaning, at least). I am most likely trying to get at the person who
wrote this page:
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~bparsia/
And you are most likely trying to get at the person who profits from:
http://www.fragrancex.com/products/_cid_perfume-am-lid_B-am-pid_757W__products.html
Now, I know the line is that one of these uses is *authoritative*,
i.e., the "owner" of the URI is "right" about it (let's put aside how
crazy I think that is :)) But suppose all the URI owner says is:
http://ex.org/#Bijan a Person.
And you and I want to say something about...Bijan. Because we think
Bijan rocks and want to say so.
So, in this case, a machine would reason that
"http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~bparsia/"; also profited from
"http://www.fragrancex.com/products/_cid_perfume-am-lid_B-am-pid_757W__products.html";.
But from human perspective, if the above two persons are different
individual and the URI "http://ex.org/#Bijan"; is used to identify only
one of them. So, someone is either ignorant or trying to steal the
other's identity. In fact, without a mean to "dereference" the URI, how
can we know which is the case?
So, the reason that we need a URN is because we want "ambiguity"? It
feels strange to me why this should be promoted.
I think the context of discussion should be framed a little bit of more
clearly. Although the thread sounds like HTTP vs. LSID, it is , in
fact, more about URL vs. URN. HTTP URI is put up front mostly due to
its success as the mostly supported and used URL. Had LSID been the
most popular, the argument now can well be LSID vs. URN.
The "URN" that Bijian is talking about now is not the URN that is
defined in URI nor the one envisioned by the LSID designer. For those
types of URN, there are already too much argument argument and has been
summarized in [1].
The URN Bijian/Chimezie/and others are talking about, at least from the
given use cases, is intended for a URI that has no associated
transportation protocol whatsoever. Perhaps, we should give it a name,
something like, URNN (any good suggestion) so to narrow the scope of
discussion.
1. URNs, namespaces and registries:
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/URNsAndRegistries-50.xml.
